Cleaning up, switching to YUI, better blog, and going more social

30Dec

December 30, 2008

It has always been my goal to write more on my blog. I enjoy writing but I have not had a chance to really spend the time to sit down and write. Of course, one thing that has always stopped me is knowing that my blog doesn’t look the way I want it to, but this has now changed.

I’ve been off from work for the holidays and during most of this time I’ve been in front of my Mac coding away. My first major change on the site was switching the markup and css to use YUI – Yahoo’s User Interface libraries.

YUI is brilliant library that helps to speed up the development of any web site by providing code that can just be inserted into your site and will work on any of the main browsers out there. As a developer, I don’t need to worry – for the most part – about differences in which IE6 will render a page than Firefox 3.

So, I’ve done the YUI switch by going in each of my templates on my site and changing the markup and css to create a much more markup efficient site.

As you’ll also notice the blog looks considerably different. I went through and overrode nearly every template (and some actions) in the blog engine to create the custom look I desire. This took a long time.

After that, I’ve been adding a lot more social features onto the site with the automatic inclusion of my twitter and flickr feeds, with plenty more features to come.

Overall, this the the first phase complete. This is my second week off from work for the winter holidays and I’ve spent most of it in front of the Mac coding away. I’m going to relax the reminder of my time off and will now work on new features and my writing in the future. I’ve got plenty of ideas of things to write about including how to use Delicious more effectively.

I’m signing off now, but please let me know if you find any bugs in the site. I already know of at least one on the About page with a gap in the images, but I’m sure there will be a few more.